


There but for the grace

by damnmydooah



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-16
Updated: 2013-10-16
Packaged: 2017-12-29 15:07:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1006831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnmydooah/pseuds/damnmydooah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Abbie feels the pull Ichabod has on her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There but for the grace

**Author's Note:**

> Drabble for the fuckyeahsleepyhollow competition, although I also just really wanted to put something up here and become part of this amazing site and fandom. This doesn't actually have a proper ending because it's the beginning of a story that I have been trying and failing to write a few times now. Maybe I'll get there or maybe I'll manage to write something sometime. For now, this'll have to do. (Also, written before 1.05 with the cabin)

One late night she follows him into his hotel room, because she’s so very, very tired and apparently unable to resist the constant pull he has on her. He doesn’t mind or notice and when he shrugs off his coat her eyes are drawn to the large scar across his chest, visible through the wide V of his ancient shirt.

 

Before her conscious can tell her, “No Abbie bad touching no”, she’s stepped up to him and is tracing the scar with her finger, slightly stupefied by what it means. Crane goes very still and she faintly registers the stare he directs at the top of her head.

 

“This killed you,” she says softly. The scar, which, for him, shouldn’t even be a scar, in his mind he only received it a few weeks ago, is raised and puckered and although it’s technically two hundred and fifty years old it still looks so angry. “You died.” Yet she can feel his heart beating furiously just beneath it, and she knows exactly how alive he is because every time he looks at her she feels it.

 

“So I did, Miss Mills.” His voice is a little shaky, and she guesses he must be tired, too. He lets out a long breath that puffs against her hair.

 

“I’m sorry you died,” she says, and lays her hand flat across the scar. “That must have been unpleasant.” The last two weeks have been such a whirlwind of action (after the twice burnt witch they fought off, among others, a wendigo and an actual, honest to God hellhound) that she hasn’t really stopped to think how all of this is affecting him. But now she realizes that he died, and then woke up not somewhere else but some _when_ else, which isn´t even a word, so that must have been confusing, and he knew no one and she hasn´t exactly been as kind to him as she should have been. Not that she´s an unkind person, she doesn´t think she is, but well. There was a _hellhound_.

 

“I died knowing I had done my duty for my country.” He leans into her hand a bit, his chin grazing the top of her head. “I am glad that it is healed, although the scar of course, remains odious to look at.”

 

“No, Ichabod, it’s not. It’s…” As she tries to find the right word for something so momentous, he shifts on his feet and she takes the last step forward and presses her open mouth against the hollow of his throat because it’s all she can reach. He sucks in a breath, lightly grabs her wrist and she can’t help but dart out her tongue and taste his salty skin. He smells of soap and sweat and something older. It takes her a while to realize that the scent is earth, dirt. Two hundred and fifty years in a grave will do that to a person.

 

He smells, she recognizes, a little bit like death.


End file.
